Hi! I have a large animated island creature in UE5.6 made as a skeletal mesh. The terrain bends and deforms through bone animation (snake-like / organic movement).
I need to place around 200 lowpoly environmental props on top of it: grass, rocks, gravestones…
The important part is that the props must remain rigid. I cannot simply skin them to the mesh because rocks and gravestones deforming would look wrong.
At first I tried splitting the foliage into clusters attached to different bones, but during animation some props still float above the surface, clip into the terrain and drift away during deformation.
I’m looking for the best workflow to attach rigid props to a deforming skeletal terrain. My current idea is to use HISM instances instead of foliage, store the closest bone + local offset for each instance and periodically do short line traces against the animated skeletal mesh to correct final height/normal.
The project is stylized/lowpoly, so tiny inaccuracies are acceptable, but I want to avoid visible floating/clipping.
If anyone has experience with this kind of setup I’d really appreciate any suggestions. Thanks 